Giving Style a Little Substance
When designer Rei Kawakubo tucks pillows under blouses and shows her collection in utter silence, simple clothes become disconcerting theater.
When Miuccia Prada proudly displays expensive clothes made to look like bargain-basement finds from the ‘70s, fashion has been transformed into a commentary on class and economics.
And when Calvin Klein searches out the most unusual, striking--some would say ugly--faces to advertise his latest fragrance, fashion is challenging the cultural definition of beauty.
A new academic journal, Fashion Theory, hopes to document and analyze such moments in the evolution of the style industry. Edited by the astute fashion historian Valerie Steele, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, the journal, due in March, sets out to prove that fashion resonates in our culture.
“It’s not a fluffy, nothing topic,†Steele says. “It has meaning, and not one that remains the same.â€
For a long time, the study of body adornment tended to fall between the cracks in the academic world. Steele hopes the journal will draw discussion from many disciplines--history, sociology, anthropology and beyond.
“[Fashion] is not some terrible monolithic thing. There’s no monster of fashion oppressing women,†Steele says. “There’s no party line. . . . I’m looking to get clashing opinions about what it all means.â€
The first issue, for example, will include an article on foot-binding that reexamines the stereotype that the disfiguring process represents the “hideous repression of women†in China. The article, instead, juxtaposes the practice with the important role played by women in that patriarchal society.
Subsequent issues will include articles lending context to Dennis Rodman’s style, examining the history of the afro and taking a close look at the distinctive language of Vogue magazine.
Robin Kelley, a professor in New York University’s history department, takes issue with the way the afro has been portrayed as solely a symbol of black power.
“I make the argument that if you get past the masculinization and go back to the ‘50s, the afro becomes a kind of high-culture, bourgeois fashion movement.â€
The style was called the au naturel, Kelley says, and was associated with femininity and a very modern, progressive view of Africa. He examines the relationship between the afro and gender, noting that “there was much more pressure on black women to abandon the afro than on black men,†and that it was black men who exerted much of that pressure.
Laird Borrelli, curatorial assistant for the museum at FIT, wrote the article on the use of language in Vogue. She studied the writing under three Vogue editors: Diana Vreeland, Grace Mirabella and Anna Wintour.
What Borrelli found was a consistent style with each that reflected not only a fashion point of view, but also the way fashion was perceived by society at the time.
For example, “Vreeland’s language was very metaphorical, with references to what we now consider to be high culture,†Borrelli says.
Fashion Theory aspires to an international audience, advisory board and list of contributors, and, indeed, essays are forthcoming from scholars in Japan, Britain and Italy. But Steele also hopes that the journal will break out of the academy to present fashion in a new light to a mass audience.
“I’m trying to choose topics that are exciting and written in accessible language,†she says.
* For more information, write to Steele in care of FIT, 227 W. 27th St., New York, NY 10001.
